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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Micro Focus is a seriously weird company. I'd love to know what their story is.

They just seem to acquire defunct software companies. The only company that I know they sold again is SuSE. Everything else is just merged into Micro Focus. We never hear from the hordes for developer that presumable works there, nor do anyone claim to be using their products.

It's just a black hole for aging, failing software companies.

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They're using the age old 'roll up' strategy: buy a bunch of past their prime products/companies with an installed base, bean count them to profitability and then milk them dry. This tends to work pretty well with enterprise customers who will pay obscene amounts of money for years/decades to maintain the status quo.

Once products/companies enter these roll up black holes, they are rarely heard from again by anyone other than legacy customers.

Their website seems to advertise the fact that they are in some the "top 9/10 investment companies, 10/10 telecommunications, 10/10 pharmaceuticals, 10/10 aerospace and defense companies." Not sure how they define topness, but maybe they've made a business out of buying up companies with lots of contracts in risk-averse fields and doing maintenance/collecting renewal fees?

Legacy software really is their stated core business. Maybe that is why they sold Suse again.

We found who's maintaining all of this COBOL code after all. They must have a lot of legacy-systems developers and can probably market themselves for expensive consultancy.

They are betting on inventing a time traveling machine. They would carry the stocks of today into the past and sell them there, then reinvest it into Apple's and afterwards would be returning back. That's what I think.

My employer had Micro Focus COBOL, acquired when we used Peoplesoft. That is long gone, but I'm not sure how long gone.

> [Micro Focus] just seem to acquire defunct software companies. [...] It's just a black hole for aging, failing software companies.

Oh, so a bit like Computer Associates, then?

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